Chapter 33: A Short List of Suspects

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which the villain is hiding somewhere dark and dramatic, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry down the corridor. Where is the best place to hide a wrongdoer? Not in the dark, because the dark is the first place anybody looks. Hide him where nobody questions the person in charge: behind a desk, in front of a class, with a piece of chalk in his hand.

Mr. Fred looked at Arthur for a moment too long.

It was a small thing, and on an ordinary day, Arthur would have missed it. But he had just put his phone in a bag and zipped it shut, and a boy who stops refreshing a screen is surprised by how much room there is in his head. Things start to arrive in it. Small things, the kind that had been waiting politely outside while he was busy.

The first thing to arrive was Mr. Fred’s face.

The ghost was smiling, as he always did, but his round crooked glasses had slipped to the end of his nose, and the plate in his hands was trembling very slightly. He was looking at Arthur the way you look at a puzzle you are fairly sure you have solved, and are not at all sure you want to be right about.

"Thank you for the muffin, sir," said Arthur.

"Yes. Of course. Anytime." Mr. Fred floated back half a foot, bumped gently into the doorframe, and said, "Draft!" to nobody, and was gone.

Carter watched him go. "He’s weird today."

"He’s always weird."

"He’s weird in a different way today," said Carter, and left it there, which was the most Carter thing Carter had ever done.

Arthur stood alone in the hall. A cadet slouched past with a sandwich. Down the corridor, a very old clock ticked over the lockers. And in the quiet, the second thing arrived, so softly that he almost did not notice it was a thought.

Why was the playground a school?

It had been there all along, sitting in plain sight like a library book somebody forgot to return.

The Game of Life had put them in a schoolyard. It could have been anything: a casino, a courtroom, a haunted carnival. Instead, there had been a bell, a chain-link fence, a corkboard with rules pinned to it in marker, and lunchboxes with screens that said lunch money. There had been a Lost and Found for phones, and monitors in yellow safety belts. Even the man who ran it had talked like a teacher, with a teacher’s weary, patient pleasure in a rule that had been broken in a clever way. Rules are made, dear. And one of the main reasons they get made is somebody cheating a perfectly fair system.

Arthur turned it over, slowly, like a coin he was not sure was real.

A Happy Place was the room that made you feel the safest in the world. Jaquan had said so. And the collector’s had been a schoolyard at noon, with floor wax and cut grass and a clock tower stuck at twelve.

Nobody builds a playground that carefully unless they have spent years standing at the edge of one.

Which meant that whoever ran the Game had spent years in a school.

Maybe this one.

And it was not the first time he had been told.

He had seen it the night he possessed Lyra, in the dim room at the back of her mind. The memory had soft edges, like a photograph left in the sun, but a few things in it had stayed sharp. A glass desk. A teacup with a chipped rim. A red pen lying across an open ledger, in which every number ended in a zero, coins counted in tens. A hand tapped the column twice, and on its middle finger sat a ring with a flat stone that caught the light. The figure behind the desk was masked, and its voice had been filtered until it sounded like a radio left on in another room.

"Results matter more than the price."

That night, he had decided it meant someone with access to the Academy’s coins. He had even told himself, with the old pleasure of a puzzle clicking into place, a teacher. I just need to know which one. Then Lyra’s eyes had opened, and the whole thought had gone straight out of his head.

Now he held it up against the schoolyard, and the two fit together like halves of a torn ticket. A red pen was not the tool of a banker or a gangster. It was the tool of somebody whose job was to mark things wrong. Two clues, from two different directions, were pointing at the same door.

He took a step. Then another. It was a quiet, careful kind of walking, the kind you do when you suddenly realize the floor might be listening. The Academy was a school. It was, without doubt, the strangest school on any map, and it behaved like a place built by a committee of people who each did exactly what they pleased. But it was still a school, and a school has teachers. And a teacher has a classroom, a schedule, and a great deal of time.

Time. That was the question. Where did anyone find the time to run an entire Game on the side?

The answer, he realized, was the Academy’s own habit.

The Academy tried its best to hold at least one class a day. It did not try very hard. Most of the teachers were hunters, who went on hunting trips and were rarely seen. The ones who did turn up could take as long as they liked, because the other teachers never came to push them out. Nobody was waiting to use the room. Nobody was watching the clock. If a teacher wished to teach for two hours, or four, or the whole afternoon, the school simply let him, and the rest of the day belonged to him.

They do their best to give us a reason to come here, thought Arthur. And whoever shows up gets the run of the place.

A teacher with the run of the place had the time. What he needed now was the money.

That was easy as well. Everything in the Game ran on coins, and so did everything in the Academy. The Game had lent each of them two thousand coins, the way a bank would lend a stack of bills. Somebody had to have those coins first. And the only people in the school who were paid in coins, every single month, were the ones who actually taught.

So it can’t be one of the absent teachers. He ticked it off. They don’t turn up, so they don’t get paid. And no pay means no coins to lend.

Which left the teachers who were here.

And there was one more thing, the thing that sealed it. Coins at the Academy came with a privacy clause. It was not the kind found in a boring contract, with tiny print. It was a magical one, the real kind, and it meant nobody could see what a teacher did with the coins they earned. Not the headmaster, not the other staff, not even the System. A teacher could spend them on anything in the world, and the world would never know.

It’s the perfect cover, thought Arthur. It’s almost too perfect.

He stopped by the trophy case and tore a napkin from the muffin plate in his hand. He had no phone. He did, however, have a pen, and a napkin, and for the first time in two days, a clear head.

SUSPECTS, he wrote.

1. Mr. Fred. He underlined it, then hesitated. The boy ghost with the flour on his sleeve, who had never once been late, never once told a lie, and had spent the entire morning checking the same door. He was sweet. He was also, Arthur reminded himself, over eighty, and very good at keeping a secret.

2. Dr. Elor. He wrote it more slowly. Two hundred years of obsession. A man who had once taken life from the living, to fix a mistake. He had a story that could not be checked, a body that was not quite a body, and eyes that missed nothing. He had also seen Arthur’s face and said, I did not like it. Could a man like that run a Game? Or did he just know exactly how it felt?

3. Mr. Abernathy, he added. He taught how to get a job. And the Game turned its losers into employees. It was either an extraordinary coincidence or an extraordinary joke. There was only one problem: Arthur had skipped every one of his classes, so he knew the man only as a name on a schedule. He would have to meet him to know anything at all.

4. The witch. A Thursday teacher, "a bit mean," who might or might not appear. It was a reasonable alibi, and exactly what a clever person would choose. He had never met her, either. Everything he knew about her came secondhand from Carter, who had actually gone to her classes, and Carter’s opinion of her could be summed up in two words: a bit mean. He would have to meet her to know the rest.

And then, at the bottom, with a flourish: Sac.

He crossed it out at once. Too stupid. It was not the kind of thing you could prove, but it was the kind of thing you could simply know.

A guilty man hides where no one thinks to look; the same place you’d find him in the same old book.

It was a short list, and that was the problem. It had four names and no evidence.

The list he had made inside Lyra’s head had held only three names, and every one had been a guess in a name tag. This one was not much better. The only real detail he had to check it against was the ring with the flat stone, and even that was no use yet. Mr. Fred’s cardigan swallowed his hands, and Dr. Elor wore gloves. For everyone else, Arthur would have to see their hands in person, and he could not do that without turning up to their classes, which, until this morning, he had made a point of never doing.

He needed information, and information, in a school, belonged to one person.

Arthur had skipped most of the classes the Academy had ever given him. It had not been a plan. It had just been how things went, one missed lesson at a time, until his schedule looked like a very polite suggestion. But the school allowed its students to stay on the grounds long after the final bell, to wander, and loiter, and do whatever they wanted before the buses took them home. Most of them did. By late afternoon, the corridors had the lazy, half-emptied feel of a stage after the show.

So he walked up to the headmaster’s office himself.

It lay at the end of a long hallway lined with portraits of people who looked disappointed in him. The door was dark wood, with a brass plate and a small window of frosted glass. In front of it sat a desk, and behind the desk sat the person it belonged to.

She was a thin, upright woman of about fifty, with glasses on a chain and a stapler placed at her right hand like a weapon. A brass name plate said MS. HOLLOWAY — SECRETARY. She did not look up when he came in. She finished the line she was writing, blotted it, and then raised her eyes, very slowly, with the smile of a woman who used it only as a kind of paperwork.

"Yes?"

"I’d like to see the headmaster."

"Do you have an appointment?"

"No. It’s important."

"Everyone’s matter is important." She slid a form across the desk. It was pink, and an inch thick. "Form 11-B. Meeting request. Fill it in, sign it, and submit it in triplicate. Allow three business days."

"It’s urgent."

"Then Form 11-B, marked urgent, in red ink." She said it without malice. She said it without anything. "Urgent requests take two business days."

"Ms. Holloway. I only need five minutes."

"Nobody can simply see the headmaster, Mr. Specter." She turned back to her writing. "That is rather the point of me."

He stood in the corridor with a pink form in his hand, trying to breathe in a way that would not shout.

She was only doing her job. That was what made it so much worse. If she had been rude, he could have been angry. She had been correct, in a flat, immovable, bureaucratic way, which is the one thing you can never win an argument against.

Why do I have to fill out a form to talk to him? he thought. Who does he think he is? He’s just a man.

The thought stopped.

Just a man. With a title, a car he adores, and an office nobody is allowed into. A man who could fine a student a hundred coins, with a single sentence, and see it deducted. A man who, as far as Arthur could tell, could reach into the Academy’s accounts whenever he liked.

He took out the napkin. Under the four names, and the one crossed out, he added a fifth.

5. Voss.

He looked at the closed door. Then, because he was feeling petty, and because it was his list, and he could put whoever he wanted on it, he went back to the napkin and added a sixth.

6. Ms. Holloway (?).

He had no idea how a secretary would get her hands on that many coins. He decided he did not care. If she was going to stand between him and a straight answer, she could be a suspect. It was his napkin.

It would have been much easier, he thought, to find more clues before the meeting with Hadjer’s father.

And then he stopped walking.

It was a strange sentence to think, and it hurt in an odd place.

Hadjer’s father. He said it again, silently, to see if it would stay the same. It did not. It sat in his chest, tight and a little cold, like a swallowed coin.

He was going to meet her father. He would sit in a room with a thick carpet and a man who called people sweetheart, and he would explain things he could barely explain, and Hadjer would not be there. She had not answered a single message. She might not even be in the house.

Something shifted in his head, and a small, twisted, quiet thought slid in under the door.

Why am I even trying this hard?

He stood very still.

Why did I get involved in any of this? The Game, the contract, the whole mess? I was fine. I was bored, and fine, and nobody was hurt. The thought was smooth and reasonable. It had a lovely tone, like a voice on a train that tells you it is only a little further. If I take her out of it, none of this makes sense. All of it is stupid. All of it is for nothing.

It was exactly the kind of thought a second face would have.

Arthur noticed, and it frightened him, and for a moment he stood in the empty hall with his hand pressed flat against his own chest, as if he could hold something in.

I’m not doing it, he thought. I put the phone in the bag.

And then, from somewhere unexpected, a different voice arrived. It was loud, and a little smug, and wearing a scarf in all weathers.

Dude.

He thought of Jaquan, who had talked at him for an entire bus ride and made a clan out of a chat window. He thought of Matt, who had given his number away like a napkin. He thought of Bliss, who thanked everyone four times and had found a friend, a real one, after twelve years of looking.

At least I found them, he thought, and, to his own surprise, he smiled. It was small and crooked. It was the first one he’d had all day that had not been aimed at a door.

I wonder how the clan is doing.

The thought was warm, and simple, and for about four seconds, it was the only thing in the world.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Specter."

Arthur jumped, rather badly.

A very large shape had materialized at his elbow, with no sound at all. It was dark, and tall, and wrapped in a long black coat, with a beard like a well-tended hedge and a calm face that had never in its life been surprised. It seemed to have come out of the wall. It had certainly come from somewhere, because Arthur had been standing in this hallway for a minute, and the hallway had been empty.

"Mr. Igred," said Arthur. He did not quite manage to keep his voice level.

"Just Igred, if you please." The big man inclined his head with great courtesy. "I apologize for startling you. I have been waiting by the front gates for some time, and I did not wish to leave you to find your own way."

"Find my way where?"

"I have come to take you to see Mr. Lotus." He said it quite simply, as if he were announcing the weather. "If you have the time."

Arthur looked at him. He looked at the pink form in his hand, and at the napkin with its six names, and at the dark wooden door, which had not opened and was not going to.

He had been right about one thing, at least. He had wanted more clues before this meeting, and now he would not have them. He would be walking in with a napkin, a feeling, and a whole lot of nothing.

And somewhere, in a very large house with a very thick carpet, she might be waiting on the other side of the door.

"I have the time," said Arthur.

TO BE CONTINUED...